Changes to the software of a computer system are a risk to system security, stability and performance. By tracking changes, a system administrator can measure the risk impact to a system and predict the problems changes can cause before they occur and can take actions to prevent failure. Change tracking is particularly important in a managed hosting environment where a service provider supplies equipment such as servers for a customer to use for purposes such as web page hosting. Normally, these service providers allow customers access to their servers for the customers' use and guarantee the availability or uptime of the server. Therefore, the service provider has an interest in preventing problems that could lead to the servers being unavailable. For this reason, service providers may wish to track changes made to the server's software in an effort to analyze the risk of such changes, avoid problems caused by changes, and aid in problem resolution and recovery. Additionally, change tracking can aid in intrusion detection, infrastructure control and configuration management, and system management, such as backups and rollbacks.
However, the joint-ownership model complicates tracking of changes in such a managed hosting environment. That is, both the customer and the provider “own” and have access to the servers in use by the customer. Both parties also have tasks, such as maintenance, that must be performed on the servers. Because of this joint-ownership, it is not always possible to determine who is responsible for changes that may create problems for the system.
Since both the customer and the service provider may make changes to the system, both parties could be made responsible for tracking their own changes. However, such division of responsibilities could lead only to finger pointing in the event of problems. Additionally, most service providers would not want to rely on customers in such a manner since it is the service provider that is responsible for the availability of the servers, not customers.